“I love it when a boy is as beautiful as a girl and a girl is a handsome as a man.” So said Casey Cadwallader, the New Hampshirite recently appointed as designer at Mugler, as we checked out his first Resort collection for the house.
Cadwallader’s predecessor, the Georgian designer David Koma, was very much about a powerfully defined, often hard-edged femininity, and his version of Mugler worked. Cadwallader’s sensibility is completely different, of course: His version of Mugler very much looks like it will work too, just from a different angle.
This was an on-purpose softer, street-ier Mugler girl/boy (some of the pieces are designed to be unisex, or are cut for men, too). Really enjoyable was the sympathetic not-quite symmetry between the seams of corsetry in the fitted torsos of Cadwallader’s full-armed washed nylon jackets and peplumed armless cotton tops—these seams narrowed the waist—and the gently spiraling, fringe-marked, 16-seam per-leg seam in his jeans: These seams widened the leg. The denim also came un-fringed, with a complementary high-hemmed seamed jacket. This seaming seemed a trademark in the making.
After starring in the Spring campaign, Debra Shaw returned to model looks for Cadwallader’s Mugler book that included that jacket in 12 subtly different shades of blue twill above some patched blue cargo pants with a modest trail of strapping at the ankle. Parachute pants in more washed nylon—blue, white, black—with zip-able sections to inhale or exhale the line of the garment looked sexy and tough.
Evening looks—or what-the-hell brunch looks—included two fabulous fringed pieces: a black, bodiless jacket from whose shoulders hung a dramatic swaying mass of knitted black fringe, and a dress that supported what Cadwallader said was a total of around 900 meters of fringe in eight shades of “nude” with blurring-with-movement continents of yellow, raspberry, and blue. Discussing an airbrush-printed sheer T-shirt made of a springy recycled plastic, Cadwallader referred to the “underpinnings” worn beneath them: so charming. He seems a calm, assured, and ideas-rich steward at Mugler. And those jeans are great.
